Bryce on Act 10
Candidate says unions share part of blame for limits on bargaining.
Randy Bryce — the labor activist now running for Congress — blamed unions as much as Gov. Scott Walker for severe limitations on collective bargaining, according to a new book.
“People think that unions are useless today, that we’re dinosaurs,” Bryce said in 2015, according to the book. “Well, how did that happen? We let it happen. The labor movement has become lazy, because it’s something that’s been handed to us.”
Bryce, a Democrat running for GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan’s congressional seat, said unions need to take bolder measures and raised the prospect of engaging in a general strike, according to “The Fall of Wisconsin: The Conservative Conquest of a Progressive Bastion and the Future of American Politics,” a forthcoming book by Dan Kaufman.
The book focuses on Act 10, the 2011 law that all but ended collective bargaining for most public workers in Wisconsin. It also details what supporters call the state’s right-to-work law, which was passed in 2015 and ended the ability of unions and private employers to reach labor deals that require workers to pay union fees even if they didn’t belong to unions.
In the book, Bryce is paraphrased as saying the leaders and rank-and-file members of unions had been so timid that they bore as much blame as Walker and other Republicans for Act 10 and the right-to-work law.
Kaufman first reported Bryce making some of his comments — including that unions were as responsible as Republicans for the labor limits — in a 2015 article in the New York Times Magazine.
But on Monday, Bryce — a mustachioed ironworker known as IronStache who loudly fought both laws — said he did not believe unions were as responsible as Republicans for the measures that curbed union powers.
He said what he meant was that unions were vulnerable to the attacks because their members didn’t know enough about their own history and had gotten used to being treated reasonably by former Gov. Tommy Thompson and other moderate Republicans.
“To have this extreme version of Scott Walker who was trying to decapitate us, I don’t think anybody was ready for that,” said Bryce, who was political coordinator for Ironworkers Local 8 when Act 10 passed.
“We weren’t ready. I’ll take the hit for not being as ready as we should have been.”
A different take
Union leaders who were involved in the fight against Act 10 said they didn’t agree with Bryce’s claim in the book that unions are as responsible for the labor restrictions as Republicans.
“I think the statement is misplaced,” said John Matthews, the former longtime director of the Madison teachers union. “Act 10 wasn’t the result of public-service unions being timid. … I really disagree with what Randy’s saying there.”
“I disagree with Randy on that, but I also understand the sentiment,” said Rich Abelson of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who was in charge of the union local for Milwaukee County at the time Act 10 was passed.
Abelson said he was worried about apathy among union members going back to the 1990s. He said in retrospect he wished the labor movement had been more proactive but didn’t think it would have stopped Act 10.
“I think the forces lined up against us were so powerful and they were playing
such a long game in taking power to do the things they did … that I don’t think anything we would have done more militantly, more actively, would have made a difference,” he said.
Bryce made the comments to the book’s author outside a union meeting two weeks after Walker signed the rightto-work law. Bryce called for union members to be bolder, saying he had floated the idea of engaging in a general strike.
“At last month’s meeting, I talked about how the only way to fight back is to stage a massive general strike,” Bryce said, according to the book. “It doesn’t need to be that, but we need to build ourselves up to a strength where they fear that. Now they’re not afraid of anything, because we haven’t done anything to fight back.”
On Monday, Bryce pointed to recent teacher walkouts in Arizona, West Virginia and Oklahoma. Those were strong showings by labor that resulted in better pay, he said.
“I was hoping for something along those lines,” he said of his 2015 comments.
Such actions were harder to pull off in years past because the Republican move against Wisconsin unions was a “sneak attack” that left labor unprepared, he said.
Bryce is running in the Aug. 14 Democratic primary against Cathy Myers, a teacher. The winner is expected to face Republican Bryan Steil, an attorney and member of the University of Wisconsin System’s Board of Regents. Several other lesser-known Republicans are also running.
“Teachers, secretaries, highway workers, and all public-sector workers were attacked by Scott Walker, not because they were too passive, but due to their strength, which posed a threat to his anti-worker, privatization agenda,” Myers said Monday in an emailed statement. “I’m disappointed, but not surprised, that Randy would speak on an issue he clearly does not understand, and would blame those whose families have been harmed for this unprecedented Republican attack on workers’ rights.”
Steil spokesman Andrew Iverson praised Walker’s union policies but did not address Bryce’s specific statements.
“The conservative reforms enacted in Wisconsin have created the jobsfriendly environment and the 2.8 percent unemployment rate we’re experiencing,” Iverson said in a statement.
Kaufman’s book, to be released July 10 by W.W. Norton & Co., offers a liberal perspective on the Republican takeover of the state that began with the 2010 elections. He is giving a reading at 7 p.m. July 24 at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee.